


Unrestrained Summer Fun

by JeanLuciferGohard



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Achilles routs the Trojan front line aka Cam plays some volleyball, Beaches, F/F, Gen, Palamedes Sextus's hot girl summer, the inherent homoeroticism of the sea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-30
Updated: 2020-06-30
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:14:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25004488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanLuciferGohard/pseuds/JeanLuciferGohard
Summary: Gideon squints at the cooler consideringly, gauging the size.“Do you think this cooler could fit a forty-melon?”“A what.” Cam says flatly.“Okay, so, I was watching youtube, and I saw this video where the guy, like, he spiked a watermelon with vodka? And we had a watermelon, but we didn’t have any vodka. But I did have a couple of forties? So I figured, eh, it’s all alcohol, right? So…”Gideon waves her hand at Harrow, and the watermelon propped on her hip.“Forty-melon! It...kind of tastes like ass, but I worked really hard. Also I’m afraid it’ll explode if I leave it in my car.”A day at the beach with Team 69, featuring inadvisable goth beach wear, relationship milestones, and Palamedes Sextus's hot girl summer.
Relationships: Camilla Hect & Palamedes Sextus, Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 19
Kudos: 232





	Unrestrained Summer Fun

**Author's Note:**

> Techinicaly a coda to the ["If Home Is Where the Heart Is (Then We're All Just Fucked)" aka the Exes AU](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24332563), but can be read as a stand-alone.

By the time she gets Harrow’s umbrella-- _ parasol _ , sorry, it’s an actual fucking parasol, as Harrow keeps insisting, and it weighs as much as a whole human child, like, a big one, like a whole third-grader, and Harrow made her carry it  _ all the way _ down the stairs, and  _ all the way _ down the beach--set up, a perfect, lightlessly black dead-pixel circle on the sand, tassled and brimming with overpriced gothic menace, Palamedes and Cam have already set up literally everything else. Cam has the towels lined up with obsessive precision and is meticulously heaping sand around the corners of the cooler, while Palamedes stands with his foot planted on top of it, eyes shaded with his hand, gazing intently into the middle distance with the keen-eyed restlessness of a warrior-poet in a shitty tank top. Possibly an especially attentive seagull. His hand is an even, dark sepia.

Gideon takes in the tableau, frowning under her snapback.

“...You’re not white,” she says at length.

Palamedes blinks at her.

“I am not,” he agrees breezily, turning to stare at the horizon again, “You can imagine how upset my parents were when they found out.”

“Alright, Captain Morgan, shut up, I just…” Gideon sucks her teeth, “Like, I forget that you and Harrow are just. Like, you look like that because you don’t ever go outside.”

“Very astute, Gideon,” Harrow drawls witheringly, materializing behind her, “Now that you’ve discovered the previously undocumented correlation between sun exposure and melanin…” she trails off, gesturing vaguely at something tucked under her arm, half-hidden by the ridiculous, gauzy bat-wing sleeves of her cover-up. Her eyes are obscured by enormous, beetle-black sunglasses. The rest of her face is shadowed by a black sunhat only slightly less absurd in scale than her umbr-- _ parasol _ .

It’s so fucking contrived. Gideon is stupid into it. She beams.

“Right!”

She squints at the cooler consideringly, gauging the size.

“Do you think this cooler could fit a forty-melon?”

“A what.” Cam says flatly.

“Okay, so, I was watching youtube, and I saw this video where the guy, like, he spiked a watermelon with vodka? And we had a watermelon, but we didn’t have any vodka. But I did have a couple of forties? So I figured, eh, it’s all alcohol, right? So…”

Gideon waves her hand at Harrow, and the watermelon propped on her hip.

“Forty-melon! It...kind of tastes like ass, but I worked really hard. Also I’m afraid it’ll explode if I leave it in my car.”

“Genuinely one of the stupidest things you’ve ever attempted, in the long and storied history of idiotic bullshit you’ve attempted,” Harrow murmurs, shaking her head. Her voice is flatly withering as she draws up alongside Gideon, but she shifts the watermelon to her other hip and tucks herself in against Gideon’s side. Just for a moment, just long enough to drop her temple into Gideon’s shoulder, face turned into her bicep.

Harrow’s cheek is sun-warm and soft. Her breath, in that moment, raises goosebumps on Gideon’s arm.

Her hat is  _ profoundly  _ in the goddamn way. Gideon sputters around a mouthful of dyed straw.

Harrow pushes away, handing the melon off to Cam, who vanishes behind the lid of the now-open cooler with a slushy, crunching noise, dislodging Palamedes in the process of starting her round of cooler-Tetris.

“Sick, soooo…”

Gideon pops her tongue, turning back to Palamedes.

“What the the fuck are you even staring at?”

“Oh,” he says pleasantly, “Cam wants blood,” and then:

“There. Center left.”

Which explains fuck-all.

Cam re-emerges from behind the cooler, grinning like a shark.

There is a long, taut pause.

Harrow rolls her eyes, ensconcing herself beneath her umbr-- _ parasol _ . Cam cracks her neck with a gruesome relish and a meaty  _ crunch _ , and between that, the grin, and the aggressively athletic grey of her racerback top, the shark metaphors are getting way the fuck out of hand. She scrapes her hair back into a scrubby ponytail, and Gideon can see Palamedes’ eyes flicker towards the back of her neck, and then away. 

So Gideon still has no idea what the  _ fuck _ is going on, expcept that maybe they’re really gonna kill somebody in broad daylight, and then:

Palamedes points across the beach.

Gideon looks, and sees--

“Volleyball? Why the fuck would you say ‘oh, yeah, Cam wants to kill a dude’ about a pick-up game of beach volleyball?”

“You’ve never seen her play volleyball.”

“I want to watch the light leave a man’s eyes,” Cam nods agreeably, clapping Gideon on the shoulder. “Come on, Nav.”

“Well,” Palamedes hums somewhere behind them, as Cam pulls Gideon away, “shall we spectate?”

She only just hears Harrow snort in reply.

“Oh, be honest, you’d love to see them kill somebody.”

A rustle.

So they have an audience after all.

* * *

The next forty minutes may well be among the most violent of Gideon’s life. 

The sand under her heel is churned into a thick, gory mud, thready with screams, choked with the blood of beachgoing would-be athletes, innocents all, all of them helpless in the face of Camilla Hect’s off-hand spike and eight foot vertical leap. The air reeks of salt and copper.

_ THUNK _

Cam leaps, sinewy and exquisite, and her arm stretches out in a flashing comet-tailed arc, and the ball hits the dirt like the death of the dinosaurs.

Off to one side, Palamedes golf-claps politely. 

“This feels...wrong,” Gideon winces. “It’s like watching a toddler getting mauled by a puma.”

“I did say,” Palamedes remarks.

Hector--Gideon’s pretty sure the guy’s a Hector--slumps off the court, the latest in Cam’s long line of bloody triumphs. She sweeps her sweaty bangs away from her face with a feral grin.

“Do I even need to be here?” Gideon gestures helplessly.

Which--honestly, no, because Cam has been handily knocking out all comers with a literally single-handed ease, but Cam catches one of her hands, and pats her knuckles consolingly.

“Nobody agrees to play if it’s just me. You’re a highly valued member of this organization, Nav.”

“Yeah, okay,” Gideon rolls her eyes, “well, while you’re mastering your, like, Secret Art: Rising Fist of Heaven technique or whatever the fuck, I’m gonna go get a goddamn ice cream.”

Cam snorts, and tosses the volleyball squarely into Gideon’s chest.

“I would argue it’s more of a ‘Lost Art: Disciple of the Falling Morningstar’ situation,” Palamedes drawls, “being, of course, a descendant of the Flying Heaven Infinity Slash,” and Harrow glances at him over the rim of her sunglasses with a dessicating glare to call him a fucking weeb, and just as he opens his mouth to respond, Gideon fumbles her bump, and sends the ball careening into his hip, a wobbling ‘Special Attack: Spiralling Tempest of the Dawn’ arc that, for all its awkwardness, flies off at speed, and connects with a thick, meaty:

_ thwack! _

He claps a hand to his side, cursing.

Harrow cackles.

“Christ alive,” Palamedes wheezes, “Fuck was that for, Gideon?”

“Sorry, sorry, I--wait, did you bruise already? I didn’t even hit you that hard, what the hell, dude?”

He blinks.

There is a dark splotch just visible under his hand, crushed between the hem of his shirt and his trunks, and it looks like it goes all the way down his leg, terminating somewhere around his knee.

“What?”

Gideon gestures.

“Oh, that? No, it’s a tattoo, I’m fine, just--that. Hurt. I repeat, what the  _ hell _ , Gideon?”

“You have a  _ tattoo!?” _

"Strictly speaking," Palamedes replies, pushing glasses up his nose, "I have three."

" _WHAT!?"_

* * *

So.

The utterly bugfuck scale of Harrow’s  _ parasol _ is still absolutely insane, but Gideon is immeasurably grateful for it as the sun climbs, and their little group contracts tighter and tighter into the circle of shade.

Gideon gnaws on her slice of forty-melon, and doesn’t even pretend to not stare at the stripe of sand marking out the curve of Harrow’s thigh.

“Very important!” she announces, “ _ How _ are we gonna get my girlfriend in the water?”

“You won’t,” Harrow says, deadpan. She does not look up from her book, not even once.

“C’moooooon,” Gideon whines. 

“No,” Harrow repeats, “it’s going to ruin my piercings, and I do not love you enough to risk death by sepsis, Gideon.”

She does love Gideon enough to use her knee as a pillow, though. Gideon bounces her leg impatiently, just to force her to look up.

“You got your nipples pierced in like,  _ November _ , that was eight  _ months _ ago! And then all winter, it was ‘no, Gideon, we can’t go out, my piercings will freeze’, which, by the way, I still think is bullshit, and now we can’t go swimming, because you’ll ‘die of sepsis’? Is this just your excuse for everything now?”

Eight  _ months _ .

It’s only really been two since Gideon’s gotten to even enjoy Harrow having them.

“In her defense, frozen metal in your chest is miserable,” Palamedes murmurs, hunched over a bewildering array of beach detritus. “I ended up wearing thermal compression shirts the first winter after I got mine.”

“And what did we learn from that?” Cam drawls.

Palamedes sighs.

“That you're always right, and I should’ve listened to you, and waited until spring to get them done.”

Cam hums in agreement, toying with a perfectly smooth pebble. She adds it to his pile.

Gideon blinks.

“I am having. So many upsetting revelations about you as a person today, Sex Pal.”

He salutes offhandedly. “Always happy to share.”

Gideon scuffs at his meticulous line of seashells with her foot, and he squawks defensively, flattening his hands over them with a wounded expression.

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to find intact sand dollars here? There’s a dropoff about a mile out, and they almost always break on the rocks…”

It’s like watching  _ Blue Planet _ . Gideon can feel herself start to drift off, leaning back heavily into her elbows, drowsy and warm.

Harrow resituates herself in the crook of Gideon’s hip, and sniffs. 

“I am not,” she repeats, “getting wet today.”

* * *

It gets dark in all of ten minutes, and it’s pouring after five, the sky opening up like somebody unzipped it.

Which, Gideon thinks, is how most of their relationship milestones happen, so she has high hopes, frankly.

Cam and Palamedes are long gone, along with...everyone else, it seems; it’s just her, and Harrow, and the surf, and a lone seagull eyeing them both with a baleful, pink-eyed watchfulness. 

“Well. Guess I win,” Gideon says, scrunching her toes in the wet sand.

Harrow just looks at her.

“You’re definitely getting wet,” Gideon clarifies. “This thing’s not waterproof.”

And it isn’t; the fabric is starting to sag disconcertingly, already mostly soaked-through.

Harrow regards her steadily. She takes off her hat. Lays it aside. Very slowly, she unbelts her cover-up. She stands up.

And walks directly into the rain.

Against the charcoal flatness of the sky, Harrow is a clean, black knife, perfectly upright, hair slicked flat to her skull. She is so completely wet you can barely even tell; everything runs together, except where the water breaks around the sharp knobs of her joints, running in thin, looping rivers around her ankles and wrists.

Also?

Gideon can totally see the outline of her nipple rings.

It’s a lot. 

It’s also  _ intensely  _ melodramatic. Classic Harrowhark.

Harrow lifts her chin defiantly, lofting a single eyebrow.

“Are you coming?”

She turns her back to Gideon, and strides into the surf--

And stops, yanking her leg back away from the freezing spray, and Gideon jogs out after her, and doesn’t laugh. Honestly.

“C’mere,” she says, absolutely not snickering.

Harrow allows herself to be held, with about as much grace she ever does, stiff against Gideon’s side, but pressed up so close you’d think she was terrified of the mere  _ concept _ of distance. She edges one foot into the water. Waits. Follows it with the other, and stands there, staring at her feet turning pale from the cold underneath the water lapping at her ankles, and clutching at Gideon’s hand.

“We didn’t...do this. My family. We didn’t…”

Harrow shakes her head.

“Salt water was something else, the idea of it just...being here, and meaning nothing…”

She waves her hand at the horizon, trailing off.

“Anyway.”

She takes another step, and another, up to her knees now. Then her waist, then her chest, having apparently decided that there’s either not as much risk she claimed, or that she does actually love Gideon enough to risk dying of sepsis, and for a long time they just...stand there, Gideon pulling Harrow in, and resting her chin on the top of her head, and not saying anything.

Gideon swallows.

“Hey. You know I love you, right?”

Harrow rolls her eyes.

“I had no idea.”

“Alright, I was trying to be nice,” Gideon snorts, pulling away.

Harrow catches her by the elbows. Her jaw works back and forth with a strained, ridiculous expression. Finally, something seems to break open, and she sighs.

“I love you too, idiot.”

They pick their way back up to the shoreline, Harrow bitching about her imminent death by hypothermic shock the whole way, and they’re almost there when Gideon stops abruptly, lunging back into the surf.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Harrow says, folding her arms skeptically.

Gideon grins, shaking the water off of her dripping forearm, and chirps: 

“Souvenir!”

She presses a single, perfectly intact sand dollar into Harrow’s hand.

**Author's Note:**

> this is like.  
> If Northerly Island Beach in Chicago was also Ocean Beach in San Fransisco, y'now?  
> Paypal me $7 USD for the location and design of Sex Pal's tats, and hit yr gal up on twitter @gin_n_chthonic, or tumblr @thefaustaesthetic


End file.
